Pope criticises the Vatican’s ‘traitors of trust’
THE POPE issued a stinging criticism of the Vatican’s top administration yesterday, saying “traitors” were standing in the way of his reforms.
For the fourth year running, Pope Francis used his Christmas greetings to the Curia, the Roman Catholic Church’s central bureaucracy, to lecture the assembled cardinals, bishops and other department heads on the need for change. “Reforming Rome is like cleaning the Sphinx of Egypt with a toothbrush,” he said, quoting a 19th-century Belgian churchman. The phrase did not evoke much mirth when the Pope read it in the Clementina Hall of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
Since his election in 2013, the Pontiff has been trying to reform the Italian-dominated Curia to bring the Church’s hierarchy closer to its members, to enact financial reforms and guide it out of scandals that marked the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, his predecessor. But he has encountered resistance, particularly as some departments have been closed, merged or streamlined.
He said some in the bureaucracy – whose members are entrusted with carrying out the Pope’s decisions – were part of “cliques and plots”. He called this “unbalanced and degenerate” and a “cancer that leads to a selfreferential attitude”.
In his address, the Pope spoke of those “traitors of trust” who had been entrusted with carrying out reforms but “let themselves be corrupted by ambition and vainglory”. However, he said the majority of Curia members were faithful, competent, and some saintly.
Later, in a meeting with lay Vatican employees and their families, he asked forgiveness for the failings of some Church officials.
He spoke hours before the funeral of Cardinal Bernard Law, the ex-archbishop of Boston, who resigned in disgrace after covering up years of sexual abuse of children by priests and whose name became a byword for scandal in the Catholic Church.